Declassified Bunker of the USSR

http://englishrussia.com/2011/11/18/declassified-bunker-of-the-ussr/

by VeXocide • 15 years ago

234 71 15 years ago

englishrussia.com

kia• 15 years ago

There is a lot of this stuff under Moscow:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro-2

ffffruit• 15 years ago

This is also mentioned in Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_2033_(book) Amazing science fiction book.

gbog• 15 years ago

Same under Beijing. There is a parking done in an old military zone, the doors are 50cm thick and the height seem to allow tanks go. Its is said there are many such tunnels under. They feared Russians, in fact. I wonder why they don't open them to cars or build the subway there.

click170• 15 years ago

Oh oh! Put a datacenter in there!

nikcub2• 15 years ago

10 years ago during the dot com bubble there were tons of companies that bought up old missile silo's and turned them into datacenters. I don't think any of them survived.

mkuhn• 15 years ago

Quite a few that store data and operate servers in old Swiss Bunkers did.

See e.g. http://www.swissfortknox.com/

kls• 15 years ago

To my knowledge, Iron Mountain is still going very strong, there are a lot of fortune 500's that use them. http://www.ironmountain.com

justincormack• 15 years ago

And the bunker datacentre in the UK http://www.thebunker.net/

Swizec• 15 years ago

How did they even build this thing? The house looks like it's from the 19th century so it doesn't look like it was torn down and built again around the bunker.

Did they hollow out an old building and put a bunker in there? How did nobody notice?

How do you even build something 18 storeys deep without breaking the confines of a two storey house with your equipment?

This thing opens up so many questions!

geuis• 15 years ago

Remember that it opens, at one point, into the subway. Its just a supposition, but I could imagine this thing being built during the construction of the subway tunnel. It would be relatively easy to disguise all the equipment going in and dirt coming out in the process.

Looking at the history of the Metro construction, the bunker construction dates to roughly the time of the 4th stage of the Metro construction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Metro

Again, its a supposition and the address of the bunker would be needed to compare to the location of the Metro built during the 4th stage.

eps4• 15 years ago

The timeframe is off. The bunker is in the vicinity of Taganskaya station (the one on the "ring") which was opened in 1950. The bunker was built between '58 and '63 - so not only it was built much later, it also took much longer than a typical subway construction project.

MWarneford• 15 years ago

Some of the pictures (http://media.englishrussia.com/112011/coldwar/coldwar003-51....) point to subway entrances. Perhaps it was built via the subway? Or at the same time?

kabdib• 15 years ago

NSFW ads at the bottom.

adriand• 15 years ago

I love this line: "Now a museum of cold war is organized in the bunker where one can try on respirators, protective gear, hold different guns, etc."

You know, the usual sort of museum experience.

As interesting as this is, it's also tragic if you think about the vast resources humankind has spent on building terrible weapons and defenses against those weapons. Imagine how much farther we would be ahead as a society if what was spent on the cold war was spent on solving the world's real problems instead - climate change, poverty, hunger, and so on.

Even more tragic is that this expenditure continues, particularly by the United States, even though the cold war is over. Those of us who thought the end of the cold war meant we could move on from spending trillions on weapons were obviously rather naive.

DuncanIdaho3• 15 years ago

Arguably the nuclear weapons have prevented continuation of WW2, where USSR and US would duke it out in the 50's and 60's.

Just wanted to point out that world of geopolitics and strategy is way more nuanced than an average person believes.

arethuza3• 15 years ago

"nuclear weapons have prevented continuation of WW2"

I would tend to agree with that. However, the levels of weaponry that were deployed were arguably far higher than was actually required to achieve effective mutual deterrence - by a huge factor. If you actually read the details of what would have happened if the Cuban Missile Crisis or Able Archer 83 had ended as shooting wars then prepare to have your blood run cold and we did get very close to indeed to shooting wars - particularly in the case of Cuba.

Somewhat ironically, given that I am British, a child of the 70s/80s and not a Conservative, one of the actual heroes of the Cold War was actually Reagan - not for his "Evil Empire" rhetoric but because he actually had the decency to believe that your average Soviet citizen was just as decent as your average America, Brit or German. He was, by all accounts, so shocked when he heared intelligence reports of how terrified the Soviet leadership were of a possible NATO first strike that he deciced to open up a dialogue with the Soviets. For most of the Cold War it was the Soviets who were afraid of NATO - perhaps justifiably so as I am not aware of any military leaders in the Warsaw Pact who actively tried to start a nuclear war, which is not something we can say about the West.

gcb2• 15 years ago

> Arguably the nuclear weapons have prevented continuation of WW2

people in Korea, Afghanistan, Vietnan, etc, etc, would disagree.

ascuttlefish2• 15 years ago

IIRC, the Soviet Union didn't test their first bomb until 1949, well after the war ended. Are you suggesting that the Soviets stopped their advance because of the American bomb?

Edit: Oh, I just noticed the bit in your comment about the 1950s/60s. So your contention is that the war might have reignited had there been no atomic bomb?

patrickk• 15 years ago

I agree with you in one sense, however the huge military expenditure allowed Silicon Valley to emerge.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=secret+histor...

You could drive yourself mad playing a game of "what if we did things this way instead?"

kiba• 15 years ago

Arguably, silicon valley could have arise in another place or we could have continued on a different technological path.

gwern2• 15 years ago

This seems like a classic broken window fallacy. I don't think you really appreciate how huge the huge is:

> The cost of the Cold War was staggering; for the US the bill was $19.65 trillion (1948-1991) in 2010 dollars, of which $8,731.5 billion (also in 2010 dollars) was expended directly for nuclear arms.[34], [35] Precise data for the dollar cost of the Cold War to the USSR are not available, however it is generally believed that the Soviet Union spent 12-13% of its GDP on military programs in direct support of the Cold War...If Soviet expenditures for the Cold War were indeed on a par with those of the US, then the approximate dollar value for whole endeavor by both sides would be in the range of $40 trillion 2010 US dollars. To put that into perspective, that is also, give or take, the approximate net worth of the United States of America, at current market value, e.g., $50-60 trillion US!

http://chronopause.com/index.php/2011/06/21/the-armories-of-...

So, to justify spending the entire net worth of the present-day US - with the emergence of Silicon Valley already priced in - you point to Silicon Valley? This is a broken window to end all broken windows.

aw3c2• 15 years ago

You posted some weird redirection link, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo is the actual target

js2• 15 years ago

I would quote from Eisenhower's Military-Industrial Complex Speech, but it should really be read in its entirety:

http://www.h-net.org/~hst306/documents/indust.html

ghotli• 15 years ago

I felt like this warranted more than just an upvote. I think this should be required high school reading.

JonnieCache• 15 years ago

>You know, the usual sort of museum experience.

The WW2 museum in london is like that as well. It's a lot of fun.

davidedicillo• 15 years ago

It would be enough stopping spending trillions of dollars in today's wars.

nikcub2• 15 years ago

gave us the internet. also employed a lot of people and we didn't get the large-scale war that most thought was due since WW2 was, like WW1, unfinished business.

eps4• 15 years ago

The via page gives the exact address - 5й Котельнический переулок, дом 11 - and the first hit in Google is http://bunker42.com/

crb2• 15 years ago

"In the center of Moscow at 65 meters underground there is an unique object which territory contains a perfectly equipped conference-hall, a karaoke-bar and an interactive museum."

crb2• 15 years ago

There is a similar facility in England, also now a museum-of-sorts of the cold war: "the Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker".

http://www.secretnuclearbunker.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvedon_Hatch_Secret_Nuclear_B...

It's a fun visit, but probably a little less authentic than this museum, as it was emptied when it was decommissioned, and it's been largely re-stocked with surplus, based on what people who worked there said that it used to look like.

The local street signs are amusing: http://www.flickr.com/photos/halfbyte/2671279410/

cbr• 15 years ago

The blue flat panel displays in the first picture and farther down are confusing. They're clearly not original, only a few years old. Perhaps the museum people did some reconstruction? I wonder what else we're seeing is reconstruction of what they thought a soviet bunker should look like.

gregschlom• 15 years ago

Yes, those are LG monitors, and you can see a PC workstation under the desk.

Too bad they replaced whatever was there with those monitors

azov• 15 years ago

"Whatever was there" was removed before the bunker was declassified.

As far as I understand from the original text (english translation on the blogspam site is incomplete at best), the monitors were installed by the company who now manages the bunker and are apparently used for simulation of nuclear strike on NY, one of the exhibits in Cold War Museum.

tawman• 15 years ago

General "Buck" Turgidson: Mr. President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap!

genieyclo• 15 years ago

Non blogspam original link: http://moscow-walks.livejournal.com/918332.html

It's not good when blogspam from englishrussia.com is on the HN frontpage for hours.

jeroen• 15 years ago

englishrussia.com has English text. Better than Russian text for most of us.

sosuke• 15 years ago

It would be nice if they linked to their sources without passing it through what looks like a stumbleupon type service. In this case they link to http://2leep.com/bar.php?url=http://moscow-walks.livejournal... as the source.

gcb2• 15 years ago

i barely saw english on that page.

illicium• 15 years ago

Unforunately, EnglishRussia is badly translated and sometimes editorialized. Take the following line, for example: "The narrow corridor is curved so that a shock wave won’t penetrate the inside of the building."

The original Russian is "Только одна из стен - полукруглая. Это неспроста, стена является фрагментом стенки круглой шахты уходящей далеко под землю", which directly translates to "one of the walls is curved, and for a good reason: it's part of the round shaft that descends deep underground". No mention of a shockwave.

cema• 15 years ago

Thank you. EnglishRussia is not only a blogspam site but also full of stupid porn links.

smacktoward3• 15 years ago

If you want to visit a similar facility in the US, there's one at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia:

http://www.greenbrier.com/play-here/the-bunker.aspx

The Greenbrier bunker was built in the late 1950s/early 1960s as the emergency relocation point for the U.S. Congress in the event of a nuclear war. Its existence was kept secret until 1992, when a Washington Post story revealed it:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/daily/july/25/bri...

There are other similar facilities from the same era now known to the public, like Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, Mount Weather in Virginia, and Raven Rock ("Site R") in Pennsylvania, but since those all still have some operational role they offer less access to the public than the Greenbrier bunker (which was decommissioned after the Post story) does.

avar• 15 years ago

That's amazing. A facility with 1600 employees that needed untold resources to construct is decommissioned as useless because the Washington Post writes an article about it.

They're of course within their rights to do so, but it's sad to think that all the work needed for the facility went to waste and its employees were laid off just because someone wrote an article on it.

jarek3• 15 years ago

It's likely that, being 30 years old, it was outdated and replaced by a newer secret structure anyway.

smacktoward3• 15 years ago

It wasn't an unprecedented decision. Mount Weather in Virginia (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Weather_Emergency_Operati...) was an even bigger project designed to house and protect the executive branch, but it was compromised through sheer bad luck when in 1974 a TWA flight happened to crash into it. Reporters came to report on the crash and were surprised to find this huge, massively secure, fenced-off Federal installation in the middle of nowhere.

Mount Weather wasn't shut down after that, but its role as a key relocation point was scaled back considerably. The problem with Mount Weather after 1974 was the same problem as the Greenbrier bunker had after 1992 -- the entire value of a facility like that is dependent on the Soviets not knowing it exists, because hydrogen bombs are so powerful that it's pretty much impossible to build anything that can survive a direct hit. The only way facilities like the Greenbrier, or Mount Weather, or even Cheyenne Mountain could hope to survive in a full-out nuclear war would be if they were secret enough so that the enemy wouldn't target them directly.

Thankfully the prospects of full-out nuclear war aren't as bad as they used to be, so the investment in most of these facilities isn't totally wasted; many government leaders were relocated to Mount Weather on 9/11, for instance, when it wasn't clear if more terrorist attacks were imminent, and Dick Cheney is said to have worked for a time in the days after 9/11 out of Raven Rock. Neither facility would survive a direct hit from an ICBM, but when your enemies don't have ICBMs they're pretty much as secure as you can get.

jarek3• 15 years ago

Another one in North America, outside Ottawa: http://www.diefenbunker.ca/

fasouto• 15 years ago

I spend one summer living in a bunker in Switzerland while I was working for CERN. Despite de absence of windows it was a great experience :D

Some photos of the bunker http://picasaweb.google.com/102604524089774844957/Shelter?fe...

cstross• 15 years ago

Here's the former Scottish wartime government command bunker, in Fife: http://www.secretbunker.co.uk/explore_the_bunker.asp

Open for visitors -- I can highly recommend it as a day out (an hour's drive from Edinburgh).

vilhelm_s• 15 years ago

And there is one in Kelvedon Hatch outside London (accessible by underground + town bus): http://www.secretnuclearbunker.com/.

unicodefreak• 15 years ago

Lots of similar stuff here http://lana-sator.livejournal.com/

edwardog• 15 years ago

The [Deifenbunker](http://www.diefenbunker.ca/) near Ottawa, Canada is a similar declassified setup that’s well worth exploring.

Looking around the C&C rooms that had “X millions of casualties” on maps of blast epicentres really makes you think about what living during the Cold War must have felt like.

X-Istence• 15 years ago

I would really like someone to take one of these facilities and turn it into a paintball play area/tournament. It would be a blast!

raquo• 15 years ago

You can play strikeball in this one!

abdulhaq• 15 years ago

Halfway down there is a picture of a bookcase with a map of Russia next to it. The map is oriented at 90 degrees to 'normal' and has Western Russia at the top and Eastern Russia at the bottom.

Declassified Bunker of the USSR

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